Theatre review: Rice

Asian-Australian playwright Michele Lee names her new play Rice, after the staple food of China and India, to tell a story about two Australian women who are the product of immigration from those countries. Nisha (Zainab Hasan) is third-generation, her grandmother having moved from Bengal to Melbourne, and the family having thrived to the point that Nisha could become a high-ranking executive in Australia's largest rice-manufacturing company. Yvette (Sarah Lam) is a first-generation immigrant with an entrepreneurial spirit, who arrived from China a single mother. Her various schemes having all failed, she's now got a minimum-wage office cleaning job. Nisha is a workaholic whose every meal is a takeaway at her desk, and we first meet them when they're arguing over her leaving the containers everywhere: She says it's the cleaner's job to tidy up; Yvette says the bargain-basement cleaning contract her firm negotiated means a maximum of two minutes per office, so if it's not in the bin it's not getting thrown away.

From this abrasive first meeting the two end up seeing each other so often they build up a kind of friendship; but actually very little of the two-hander sees the two named characters together.

Instead the actors mostly play the major figures in each other's lives, with Hasan playing Yvette's bored Russian supervisor as well as her daughter, a climate activist facing a prison sentence for assaulting a coal company boss. As the majority of the story follows Nisha's career, it's Lam who spends most of the time as others, like the downsizing new CEO who's unimpressed by Nisha's contributions to the company, her boyfriend, or her nemesis, Indian civil servant Gretel Patel.

Matthew Xia directs a slick production that sees the actresses jump between the more nuanced demands of their main characters, and the broader depictions of everyone around them. Hyemi Shin's set is a clean white office, with all the props ending up in the bins for Yvette to clear up, and dominated by a wall of lights (lighting design by Bethany Gupwell) that's variously windows, elevator, and the fountain that Nisha had installed on the executive floor as a symbol of the company's ambitions. It's left to Lex Kosanke's sound design to set up the other locations, including a very ominous flood. Many of the characters they play might be unlikeable but Lam and Hasan make for guides you're happy to lead you through a story that takes in a few quirkily comic turns (Eel Herpes?)

But what the play's trying to say ultimately remains muddled. The obvious answer would be a commentary on the problems faced by women in business, and the men around Nisha certainly don't make things easy for her, but this is undercut by her big project for the business being based on lies, not to mention making no sense: Trying to tender an Australian company to run India's rice deliveries is the very definition of coals to Newcastle, and as everyone eventually acknowledges, if Gretel Patel's passive-aggressive politeness has been about telling Nisha her plan is doomed from Day 1, maybe she should have stopped spending company money flying people out to India for meetings nobody asked for. As Nisha's fountain starts to smell but turns out to be too expensive to uninstall, it becomes a symbol for her misplaced ambition. Meanwhile the theme of two women finding a substitute mother/daughter relationship to make up for their family problems is undercut by how bad their advice to each other turns out to be. Rice is an entertaining enough 100 minutes, but I'm not sure it really gets us anywhere at the end of it.

Rice by Michele Lee is booking until the 13th of November at the Orange Tree Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 40 mimutes straight through.

Photo credit: The Other Richard, Helen Murray.